MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
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method of fiction was to her genius. For Woolf, conventional techniques
could produce only conventional fiction.
It
was not until the publication of
Jacob's Room
in 1922 that she felt, as she notes in her diary, that she had
finally learned "how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice."
Irrevocably turning away with
Jacob 's Room
from the established tradition
within which
The Voyage Out
and
Night and Day
were written, Woolf
devotes the next nineteen years of her life to exploring the different possi–
bilities of that newly discovered voice.
Jacob's Room
is the first of her novels which tries to dispense with what
Woolf calls the' 'appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from
lunch to dinner." Her well-known rejection of the realist method-enun–
ciated most emphatically in two essays, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" and
"Modern Fiction" -claims that in its attention to the superficial and mun–
dane, realism fails to catch the vital experience of living itself. Trotting out
her favorite trio of Edwardian villains-Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy-in
both essays, Woolf demonstrates how they frittered away their talent
"making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring."
In a word, they are
materialists,
devoting themselves with varying degrees
of success to the pursuit of the unimportant. Opposed to these are writers
who, like Joyce, are spiritual, who understand that life is a far more curious
and fluid affair than the stolid materialists would have us believe. The mind
does not function according
to
rigidly defined patterns, Woolf declares, but
rather receives "an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, "so that if a
writer were not constrained by convention and forced to follow prescribed
directions, "if he could base his work upon his own feeling ... there would
be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street
tailors would have it." Neither unique
to
Woolf nor by any means a theo–
retical principle she holds to in her own criticism, such an argument is pri–
marily an intensely personal assertion of what her own fiction will be.
Implicitly, we cannot help but feel it is also a way of absolving herself from
continuing to labor in the direction that the rather dismal
Night and Day
and
The Voyage Out
suggest she could not manage very happily.
Employing techniques of point of view and organization in
Jacob's
Room
that she had tentatively experimented with in "Mark on the Wall,"
"Kew Gardens," and "Unwritten Novel," Woolf attempts to embrace the
"unknown and uncircumscribed spirit" of life by avoiding much of the
prosaic connective tissue necessary to most narrative fiction . There is nothing
particularly startling (there never is in Woolf) about the subject of the novel:
Jacob's Room
is about Jacob Flanders, vaguely modeled after Virginia's
brother, Thoby, whose life we follow from infancy through his years at
